The Thompson Citizen tomorrow takes another big leap forward in the online world with a major website re-launch as Glacier Media Inc. of Vancouver, the paper's owner, continues to rollout Internet editions of its newspapers across Western Canada.
For readers, the Internet change should be seamless as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) on the World Wide Web (WWW) remains: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/
The Thompson Citizen is about midway in Glacier's current rollout schedule, bringing to fruition a project the company launched in December 2007. Glacier owns outright, or has an ownership stake in, about 80 newspapers, mostly from British Columbia to Manitoba, but also a couple now in Ontario and Quebec as well. It purchased the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News in January 2007.
Glacier is the fastest-growing media company in Canada, having almost tripled its newspaper holdings since early 2007. Along with weekly and daily newspapers, Glacier is Canada's largest publisher of trade magazines, online magazines, directories and mailing lists and is one of Canada's largest business-to-business database marketing firms specializing in gathering and disseminating information to clients. The portfolio includes trade magazines focusing on automotive, communication, construction, dental, energy, environment, financial, insurance, manufacturing, medical and laboratory, mining, occupational health and safety, plastics, pulp and paper, retail, reference and education and transportation and trucking.
Glacier's Specialty Technical Publishers is one of North America's premier publishers of comprehensive technical manuals that provide companies with necessary legal, audit and compliance information in areas including environmental law, occupational health and safety, transportation, training and business law. CD-Pharma develops accredited interactive multi-media continuing medical education programs on CD-ROM, as well as interactive videos and print media packages geared towards the health care community. Eco Log ERIS is an electronic information and report service provider that accesses key federal, provincial and private sector databases to help identify potential environmental risks in Canada for real estate developers, banks, insurance companies and a variety of other customers. Fundata provides investment fund related electronic and print information and analytics to the Canadian and global investment community and a wide variety of Canadian newspapers and media. Glacier owns 50 per cent of Fundata.
For the Thompson Citizen, the website evolution has been marked in three separate stages over the last two and a half years. Starting out virtually as a staff masthead webpage on the Internet, we moved last October to offer readers the ability to download the entire contents of both the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The feature has proved so popular we've retained the PDF format download option for readers even as we move to a highly interactive website environment tomorrow.
Our colleagues at Glacier, led by Neetu Shokar, project manager for website development with Glacier Interactive Media in Vancouver, and trainer Pina Belperio, from Whistler, B.C., have been working with us on the new Thompson Citizen website since late April.
For techies, or those who just may want to know, our digital media content management architecture as of tomorrow will be coming through SAXOTECH, Inc., which was founded in Denmark in 1992 and moved its headquarters to Tampa, Fla. in January 2005.
While we wouldn't want to spoil the surprise too much as to what you are going to see when you click on our new site, we can tell you along with our local news content, sports, editorials and Nickel Belt News front page photo contest gallery and columnists, you'll be able to read national and international stories from the Canadian Press, (CP), check out our Fundata stock market and TV listings, along with watching video from the Canadian Press.
